John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN ZEROHEDGE BY TYLER DURDEN
"Democrats Turn On Obama's "Establishment" Legacy As 2020 Approaches
"As Vanity Fair's T.A. Frank notes, Democrats surveying their options going into 2020 have begun to genuinely question the state of their party - and an increasing number of them are settling on the conclusion that Obama was a bad president"
The proposition that Obama was a failed president, it seems to me, is beyond dispute.
Obama’s eight years of bombing, intervention, war, and mass extrajudicial killings – all by a sometimes sandal-wearing Peace Prize winner – were demonstration enough.
But added to that horrible record was his total failure to do anything serious for better regulation of a financial system that had failed through excess and poor regulation. And now, again, a huge financial threat hangs over the country and the world.
And, yes, there was his awful health-care program, an ugly, costly compromise which made almost no one happy, instead of a new initiative.
I would add his failure to do anything for his own people. He lured their votes and hopes with preacher-sounding, caring words, and then he did nothing for them.
I actually view him as close to a total failure, except that he did create the Iran nuclear agreement despite Israel's intense advocacy for war. That was his only really good moment in eight years.
Destroying a stable society in Libya? Fomenting a right-wing, anti-elected government in Ukraine? Pushing American forces towards the Russian border? Starting a dirty proxy-mercenary war in Syria? Playing with poison gas in Syria to create an excuse for bombing? Allowing Egypt’s first democratically-elected president to be overthrown and tossed into prison like a common criminal? Starting an industrial-scale extrajudicial killing program? Shameful, all of them.
I still am not certain whether he was just weak in office (vis-a-vis the power establishment) or whether he was a secret devote of American imperialism. I tend to believe the former.
It is an amazing reflection on American society that in the press and from the mouths of many figures, Obama’s baritone voice and boyish smile are still regarded as having been something worthy. This l tend to see as the influence of the "Dark State," or American Power Establishment, on public perceptions.
Of course, Trump has been a terrible disappointment, too.
As we have seen, especially in the case of the Syria "withdrawal" decision, Trump's words carry little weight inside Washington's power establishment.
His own appointees go abroad and contradict him. His own military does not respond promptly to his orders, unless those orders are to hurl missiles at someone, in which case, the response is instant.
Much of what Trump says is treated by officials as though just part of his verbal-diarrhea stream of “tweets.”
That, of course, is his own fault to some degree. He talks too much without giving the words much thought. And he jumps around from topic to topic, without ever seeming to finish his thought on any of them.
But the ugly situation in Washington goes well beyond that.
I do believe that what we have seen in recent years vividly demonstrates the serious power of what is called by some, and ridiculed by others as, the "Deep State."
